Dutch mobile navigation provider Nav4All last week wrote a letter to their supposedly 27.6 million users to announce that “the global navigation of Nav4All and the Tracking & Tracing will go offline in 3 days. The reason for the same is that the data licence agreement with Navteq (a 100% Nokia subsidiary) was not extended, in a totally unexpected manner.”

Coming on the heels of Nokia's free navigation offering, this announcement made some waves in the last few days. NAVTEQ answered to that with a politically correct statement that read the following: “NAVTEQ continues to work across all companies and industries. There is no change to the fact that NAVTEQ operates as a completely independent unit of Nokia. All customers continue to have access to all data under consistent terms and conditions. Unfortunately, we were unable to reach agreement to extend our contract with Nav4All in alignment with these terms and conditions. Our priority is to operate a manner that is fair to all our customers. We are pleased that Nokia recognizes that one condition of this is for NAVTEQ to remain independent. From a NAVTEQ perspective, providing equitable terms and conditions is another.”

New terms and conditions
It is clear that NAVTEQ seems to have restricted their terms and conditions in the recent months. Market players such as Nav4all and Skobbler (read here) operating free (or low cost) mobile navigation solutions clearly do not fit into these new rules. From the NAVTEQ standpoint it is indeed difficult to offer revenue share type of contract in one hand (Nav4all and Skobbler) and full license price in the other hand to the like of NAVIGON, ALK, etc. In the application store era, where another navigation solution is only a few clicks away, NAVTEQ is trying to enforce the same licensing rules for everybody.

Unlike what Nav4all wants us to think, it does not seem there is a Nokia plot to kill their business - our true belief is that Nokia don’t who Nav4all is and don’t care. Having tried Nav4all first on a Nokia 95 a couple of years ago then on an iPhone last week, in both cases we have notbeen impressed by the solution that has a cumbersome interface that is below the user interface quality standards shown these days by Nokia, TomTom, Navigon and others.

In addition to that, the fact Nav4all is stopping its service based on not reaching an agreement with its map supplier demonstrates – if anything else – the lack of plan B from its executives. Nav4all is based in Amsterdam and, as far as we know, there are AND headquarters in Rotterdam and Tele Atlas headquarters in Gent, both in a 200 km radius.

Free market for global maps?
However, the trend shown at Nokia-NAVTEQ and TomTom-Tele Atlas is a bit worrying for the rest of the industry. The step by step integration of Tele Atlas into TomTom and the free navigation offer from Nokia is starting to create market distortions. The NAVTEQ statement explaining that “Our priority is to operate a manner that is fair to all our customers” is clearly a fiction since in reality Nokia don’t pay for maps but get them subsidized by its mobile navigation competitors, Garmin and the auto industry.

Looking at it from a broader perspective, it seems the two map makers are slowly but surely sliding away from the promises made to the European Commission two years ago when their acquisitions were investigated by the anti-trust authority. One day or another Brussels could have a second look at it.

At the time of publishing Nav4all executives were not available for comments of this story.